Daleks Are Lame

Man I feel like all I ever do is rant about Doctor Who and the myriad of ways in which it fails. On the positive side Matt Smith is a good Doctor, and Amy Pond is an interesting companion thus far. The first episode was great, reinventing the entire program with a new head writer, new doctor, new companion, new TARDIS interior, new sonic screwdriver, new logo, new theme tune, new plausible storylines... It was good. The second episode was fantastic. Those smilers were very very creepy, it felt as good as Silence In The Library, Blink, Girl In The Fireplace or The Empty Child (interestingly all my favourite episodes are Stephen Moffat episodes...) anyway then this week it was the Daleks... Because we can't go for any length of time without the fucking daleks right? Luckily we get a warning in the previous episode. Winston Churchill with the ominous figure of a Dalek looming over him. This is a signal for people all over the country to sigh miserably.

I don't understand it. Everyone I know who watches Doctor Who sees the Daleks and knows that the next episode is going to be bad. Nobody that I know sees the Daleks and rejoices, thinking 'wow I cannot wait for the next episode when we get more Daleks!'. I am not sure whether the writing staff believe that everyone gets wet pants over the sight of Daleks or whether they just want us to suffer. One thing is for sure, it's that you can't have a single series of Doctor Who without forcing in the Daleks. Which is such a shame. I liked the Daleks at first. Those first couple of episodes with them. Dalek and Doomsday. They were awesome. Dalek actually showed me why people thought that the Daleks were frightening, something I hadn't understood before. However with each iteration of the Daleks you are destroying their power to enthrall, to frighten, to fucking entertain. When it comes to Daleks less is more. And I feel that most of us have had far too fucking much already.

But hey ho lets watch the episode and see what happens. Maybe it might be good, although you can probably guess that this isn't the case because otherwise I wouldn't bother writing this angry rant review against the Daleks and how lame they are. So it starts off not with as I predicted (because I don't watch previews) the Daleks menacing Winston Churchill but something far more interesting. It's World War II and the Allies have a new weapon in the fight against the Nazis, machines called Ironsides. They bear a surprising resemblance to the Doctor's arch-enemies the Daleks, except they live to serve, whether it's blasting Nazis to bits or fetching delicious cups of tea for their masters. The Doctor is of course furious and angry and doesn't believe a word they say but nobody will believe him. For a little while I think the program might be interesting, with these Ironsides not being Daleks after all, but really things that just resemble them and then the Doctor persecutes them far too much and they become that which he despises. Winston Churchill says something along the lines of 'if the Nazis were to invade Hell I would be friends with the Devil' or something. The point being that he'd side with what he determines a lesser evil, as he believes the Daleks to be (at the Doctor's insistence) against Hitler. I thought at this point it might have an interesting moral idea at it's core, that maybe to conquer what is evil, sometimes you need to accept the help of a lesser evil. There are any number of ways in which this storyline could have progressed, all of them more interesting than what did happen. Daleks need the Doctor's voice to unlock a Dalek Prodiginator or something. Anyway they get his voice and they they unlock the Prodginator and make new silly looking daleks that come in five different colours (BUY THEM ALL, KIDS!) and then they turn all the lights on in London and so they have to send spitfires up into space to destroy the Dalek spaceship and then the Daleks have a bomb on Earth which will blow up and destroy the planet. Okay so far it's all fairly standard disappointment fare. Nothing outrageously bad (except maybe the spitfires in space and the collect them all Power Ranger Daleks), this is where it gets bad. See the Daleks built a robot man as part of their cover, he claimed to invent them. Later he is revealed as a robot, further later he assists the Allies as a good guy and then it turns out that he is a bomb powerful enough to destroy the Earth. Right so the Doctor rushes back to disarm him, but doesn't know how to disarm a bomb made from an Infinitron Sun or whatever psuedoscience gibberish they used. So obviously the way to prevent the bomb from going off is to convince the robot in which it is implanted that he is a real person.

Hey, Mark Gatiss (writer of this episode) You Fail Science Forever.

So the Doctor tries to convince the bomb that it is a human and thus it cannot explode, but he's failing and so Amy steps in and tells it that she knows what it is like to love someone you shouldn't (Fuck, why does everyone have to fall in love with the fucking Doctor?) and the robot guy thinks about this woman that he loves and so this disarms the bomb...

...

Well I don't know about you but this episode has been a tremendous education for me, next time I end up trapped in a room with a bomb I will just tell the bomb that it is something unassuming and pleasant, like a hot tub or a cheesecake. Then the bomb won't go off, obviously, and everything will be just fine. FUCK THIS EPISODE. I have had enough of it by now. By now I just want to pretend that this stupid episode never happened, file it away with Midnight and Love and Monsters and never think about it again.

The Power of Love triumphs again (remember in that Christmas episode with the Giant Cyberman Robot where he convinces the most evil woman in the world that she is really nice and so she kills the Cybermen with the power of love) much to my, and the Daleks dismay. They flee into the future presumably to be re-encountered next series or, more likely in this series finale (because you can't have a series finale without the fucking daleks). I don't know about anyone else but I have had it up to here with the daleks and I am going to launch a petition to keep them the fuck out of Doctor Who until the writers prove they can figure out a halfway decent storyline to do with them. Hell I'd accept a quarterway decent storyline at this point.

Oh and there was a weird crack in the wall behind the TARDIS. I wonder if time is falling apart, and if the TARDIS itself is causing time to get ripped apart? Protip: Mysteries should be mysterious. Instead of pointing out the crack in time and space at the end of every episode how about hiding it within the episode, like they did with Bad Wolf. Then people who notice it can be all like 'ooh I found this thing I think it could be important' and then we all try and solve the mysterious mystery. It's fun. You should try it some time.